On December 7, 2006, a date which should live in infamy but probably won’t, a New York Times article declared Richard Nixon’s Vietnam War strategy a success. The Times was trying to place in historical perspective the front-page news of the day: a bipartisan panel had called for total withdrawal of American combat troops from one of the two wars that were then in the midst of eclipsing Vietnam as America’s longest and least popular.1 In a sidebar headed “Military Analysis,” the paper’s chief military correspondent, Michael R. Gordon, took aim at the panel’s proposal to withdraw American combat troops from Iraq in fifteen months. The headline asked, “Will It Work on the Battlefield?” Gordon’s answer was no. “The military recommendations issued yesterday by the Iraq Study Group are based more on hope than history,” Gordon began. He provided this version of history: “It took four years, from 1969 to 1973, for the Nixon administration to make South Vietnamese forces strong enough to hold their own and withdraw American combat forces from Vietnam. Even so, when Congress withheld authority for American airstrikes in support of those forces in 1975, the North Vietnamese quickly defeated the South and reunified the country under Communist rule.”2
Gordon’s history lesson packs a lot of wrong into two sentences. It took four years for Nixon to hide his failure “to make South Vietnamese forces strong enough to hold their own.” Nixon kept American troops fighting that long because he realized that Saigon would fall without them and that his reelection prospects depended on delaying Communist victory past November 1972. Moreover, President Ford never asked Congress for authority to launch air strikes in Vietnam, so it’s just not true that “Congress withheld authority for American airstrikes in support of those forces in 1975.” Worse, Gordon ignores the leading role that Nixon and Ford both played in denying the president the authority to order such strikes. Besides, no one has ever shown how Nixon or Ford could have solved the problems that sending in the B-52s would have caused.
The problem is not that one journalist got some facts wrong. All Gordon did was summarize the conventional story of how the war ended (while getting some facts wrong). The conventional story is the problem, because Richard Nixon authored it. Compare Gordon’s history lesson to the one Nixon gave in No More Vietnams:
All that we had achieved in twelve years of fighting was thrown away in a spasm of congressional irresponsibility.
When the Paris peace accords were signed in January 1973, a balance of power existed in Indochina. South Vietnam was secure within the ceasefire lines. North Vietnam’s leaders—who had not abandoned their plans for conquest—were deterred from renewing their aggression. Vietnamization had succeeded. But United States power was the linchpin holding the peace agreement together. Without a credible threat of renewed American bombing of North Vietnam, Hanoi would be sorely tempted to prepare to invade South Vietnam again. And without adequate American military and economic assistance, South Vietnam would lack the power to turn back yet another such invasion.
Congress proceeded to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Once our troops were out of Vietnam, Congress initiated a total retreat from our commitments to the South Vietnamese people. First, it destroyed our ability to enforce the peace agreement through legislation prohibiting the use of American military power in Indochina. Then it undercut South Vietnam’s ability to defend itself, by drastically reducing our military aid.3
As we’ve seen, declassified tapes and documents destroy the claims Nixon makes in the passage above. It’s a stabbed-in-the-back myth, an American Dolchstoßlegende. Such myths have an obvious appeal to the guilty. They shift the blame for defeat from their authors to their critics. Yet if you take the excerpt from No More Vietnams quoted above, remove its scathing moral judgments, reduce its essentials to a two-sentence summary, and toss in a couple of inaccuracies of the kind that crop up under deadline pressure, then you’ve got the history lesson that appeared twenty-one years later in the New York Times.
None of this means that the Times’s chief military correspondent is some kind of partisan political hack. On the contrary, the myth Gordon retailed as history is, bizarrely, bipartisan, embraced not only by the authors of America’s defeat in Vietnam but by their critics as well.
In the political debates over Vietnam in the 1970s, the Right and Left shared certain beliefs about Richard Nixon. Generally, both believed that Nixon would do all in his power to prevent Communist victory in Vietnam; specifically, both believed that Nixon would defend Saigon with American airpower after the troops came home. But the two ends of the political spectrum differed in their attitude toward their shared beliefs. The belief that Nixon would always defend South Vietnam with American airpower made the Right happy and the Left unhappy; the belief that Congress stopped Nixon made the Right unhappy and the Left happy. On their fundamental assumptions about Nixon’s intentions, however, the Right and Left were in agreement.
The Right and Left were both wrong. Evidence has emerged in bulk since Nixon’s death in 1994 ended his long, twilight struggle to keep Americans from finding out what was on his tapes and in his White House documents. But evidence on tape and paper sitting in archives unheard and unread can do nothing to shatter a belief. In 1999, for example, the National Archives had declassified the Nixon White House tapes from February through July 1971—the tapes referenced at the beginning of this book. In 2001, nevertheless, Larry Berman published No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger, and Betrayal in Vietnam, in which he argued:
The reality was the opposite of the decent interval hypothesis.… The record shows that the United States expected that the signed treaty would be immediately violated and that this would trigger a brutal military response. Permanent war (air war, not ground operations) at acceptable cost was what Nixon and Kissinger anticipated from the so-called peace agreement. They believed that the only way the American public would accept it was if there was a signed agreement. Nixon recognized that winning the peace, like the war, would be impossible to achieve, but he planned for indefinite stalemate by using the B-52s to prop up the government of South Vietnam until the end of his presidency.4
Berman was still telling readers in 2001 what McGovern told voters in the fall of 1972: a vote for Nixon was a vote for four more years of bombing. As for all of the available tape-recorded evidence that Nixon’s real strategy was to postpone, not prevent, Communist victory, Berman didn’t mention it. Any of it.
Upon such omissions rests the continued belief in Nixon’s Vietnam Dolchstoßlegende in the twenty-first century. It’s not that people don’t believe the evidence on tape and in the declassified documents; it’s just that, by and large, most people have never heard of it.
Nixon’s backstabbing myth depends on suppression of evidence. The original suppressers were Nixon and Kissinger, who kept the taped and written evidence from the American people by taking advantage of the national security classification system. For them, suppression of evidence was a conscious, deliberate choice, a means of deception. For writers trying to understand Nixon and Kissinger, however, suppression of evidence can sometimes be an unconscious reflex. Confirmation bias is the psychological term for the mind’s bad habit of reinforcing assumptions by seizing on evidence that supports them and by discounting, rejecting, or ignoring evidence that challenges them. Although abundant evidence has emerged to shatter the assumptions shared by the Right and Left about Nixon and Kissinger in the 1970s, confirmation bias tosses the evidence aside in favor of preserving the assumptions. Whether conscious or unconscious, deliberate or unintended, deceitful or naïve, suppression of evidence has permitted a deadly myth about the past to threaten our present.